


An Empty Ballroom

by Noah_Of_Ark



Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: Drunk Jareth (Labyrinth), F/M, Fae & Fairies, faerie court
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-02
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2019-07-05 21:44:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15872319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Noah_Of_Ark/pseuds/Noah_Of_Ark
Summary: “It’s her"“The one who broke the mirrors?”“The very same”“As I live and breathe….Ugly little thing, isn’t she?”Sarah Williams ran a labyrinth, made some friends, learned some moral lessons and came out her adventure relatively unscathed. But Sarah had not ended her adventure as she thought she had.She’d eaten food from the land of fae. And fairy law states that those who eat their food may never leave the feast.The Faerie Court is fascinated in the girl that broke the ballroom, the girl that got away.The girl who ate the peach.A lot of stories on here sort of skip over the idea that in reality the tasks of the labyrinth would be very mentally draining and they DEFINITELY have the capacity for really fucking you up. This fic twists Sarah a lot and the result ended more horror-fic than I'd ever intended but I rather like the darker parts./Long chapters/





	1. The Burden Of Waking Up

**Author's Note:**

> Comments n kudos would be nice, thanks :3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wanna say thank you so much to bassiter on tumblr for givin me the inspo to write this fic. If you haven't heard it you really should it's so hauntingly beautiful.

Chapter One  
:Within such; a heroine realises her chapter has not ended, a spider resembles a mother and a letter is received:

Jareth woke up that morning to a hangover equivalent to a loving mother smothering her child with the babes own blanket in that it was a comfort he was used to but it still hurt.  
He stretched and saw black and white dots convulse behind his eyelids and felt something cold and hard knock into his ribcage as the bed creaked under him. Gritting his teeth, he opened his left eye to a slit and saw multiple milk bottles outlining the left half of his body. He gingerly attempted to turn over and sit up but the bed sunk lower down and bottles began crushing around him and he fought against the exhausted festering feeling that told him to lie back down and drink more.  
He fell out of bed, noisily and stiffly. Cracking his neck and keeping his eyes firmly shut he did his best to stand up, his footing slipping every now and then.  
“Sir?” came a voice by the door. It sounded timid rather than happy-go-lucky which meant someone was about to give him bad news.  
He didn’t like bad news. Based on the hovel his bedroom had become Sarah’s rejection he very, very, clearly did not take bad news well.  
“Uh..Sir?”  
Bad news could wait. He needed water first.  
Peeling his eyes open, he took a moment to let the light stab behind his eyes and then addressed the goblin.  
“Yes?” he said, very nicely he thought but it came off with a pained grimace and he saw the goblin get shifty.  
“There’s a letter, Sir, from the court”  
“Put it on the-” he paused for a moment. That sentence should’ve ended with ‘table’ but his table wasn’t there.  
“Uhhh, give it here. And get out. Are you deaf? Get out!”  
The goblin scurried through the door, closing it so hurriedly he jammed his hat in and apologised betweens swears of pain.  
Jareth threw the letter on the bed and started to look around, taking slow steps lest be sick.  
Sick.  
Jareth remembered where his table was.  
He hung his head ashamedly. Ambling over to the fireplace not three steps from his bed he saw the shards of table leg and top. He’d viciously vomited on the stubs of log and cinders in the fireplace, was too exhausted to clear it up so he destroyed it and put it over the top so no one would notice. Cobwebs had already begun to shimmer over the wood shards despite them being but hours old.  
Drunk him forgot about the smell that accompanied vigorous vomiting.  
Also why did he have milk bottles? He hadn’t taken a drink up to his room that he could remember.  
He decided not to dwell on it.  
He chugged some stale water that he pretended he couldn’t taste dust in. Very carefully, he lowered himself down onto his bed and opened the letter addressed to him.  
Scanning through the lines on the letter the lull of his familiar migraine that cradled his skull began bashing into it and maliciously enjoying the carnage.  
One day he’d drink enough to kill him and he wished it had been six minutes ago when he’d been stupid enough to keep breathing.  
Heart accelerating (not enough to induce a heart attack unfortunately for him) he began wondering where she was, what she was doing. If the letter was true, and there was no reason for it not to be, he couldn’t even deny how impressed he was.  
Sarah Williams. Alive.  
He was sorry he woke up, he really was. If there was any universe he could ever communicate it he wanted her to know that he was sorry for ever having the audacity to wake up, every day she’d been asleep.

*****

Sarah woke up that morning to the rather tender cry of an infant who has not been given attention in more than 40 seconds and therefore must lash out to convey his annoyance.  
She got up as quick as possible and showered as quick as possible. Did menial and mundane tasks and did her best to focus solely on them.  
Sarah did not like to give her mind alone time, no, not anymore. She stayed awake in the late hours and when she woke up her body always moved faster than her brain could. Daydreaming, which had once been a form of escape, was now her personal prison, and she took great lengths to avoid it.  
Sarah had, extremely slowly, been going insane. And that was okay. All creative geniuses have something not quite right about them but she’d never heard of anyone like this, or even any condition that could explain such intense hallucination.  
Her train of thought lead her the same ways it had since she’d woken up in this nightmare,  
‘Did the labyrinth make me have a nervous breakdown?’  
‘Was the labyrinth my nervous breakdown?’  
‘Have things always been this way?’  
‘Did I imagine that?’  
‘Surely I’m wrong…’  
And then the train of thought would derail and crash and her head would hurt so bad she’d fall to her knees and do what she could to stop the hurt til it passed over her with the ease of a steamroller. And she’d sit there, gasping and forced to continue like nothing was wrong and she was completely okay.  
She walked downstairs.

*****

As Sarah sat at the breakfast table, Karen gave her a plate that had no food on it. She was smiling intently.  
“Thanks Karen, looks lovely”  
She meant this when she said it. She’d said it once sarcastically and hesitantly; Karen misunderstood and seemed to think it was genuine praise, so Sarah said the phrase daily and tried not to think much else of it. Karen got agitated when she didn’t say it.  
Sarah wasn’t hungry. Sarah was never hungry anymore.  
She wasn’t tired either, she never needed to shower but she did so anyway. She never needed the toilet but she did so anyway. She didn’t need to eat but she did so anyway.  
What else could she do? She was doing her best to act human even though she didn’t feel it.  
Today Toby’s eyes were a softer brown.  
This used to trouble Sarah since her brothers eyes were blue. He’d got that from Karen’s side of things. Sarah and her Dad were brown eyed.  
It didn’t trouble her as much as other things now. She’d come downstairs and make a mental comment of his eye colour everyday like one might note the colouring of the sky. It didn’t trouble her too much. It didn't.  
And her Dad. Robert Williams. He was lankier today, she nodded to herself. His hair was greyer. Or possibly not. His clothes fit very loosely.  
Karen was Karen. She smiled when looking round the table but every time she talked she had a scathing tone. Even when she was saying nice things.  
Sarah would think this and then be unable to remember the last time Karen spoke. Or when someone other than her said a goddamn thing.  
Sometimes parts of the house wouldn’t be there. Like the phone behind Karen wouldn’t be there, and then Sarah would think ‘hey wasn’t there a phone?’ and then she’d look and it’d be right there and she’d just missed it because she was so tired and silly and not looking properly. Even though she was never tired. Even though she realised she was thinking of the landline at her friends house and not at hers. One never existed at hers. But there it was. Silly. Silly her.  
And then sometimes it’d be the other way. Sometimes she’d think “Why’s my mom’s chair still here? Dad broke it when she left” and then she’d look to the window and see the fire her Dad built the way she had when she was seven and then she’d look again and the chair was never there or the fire and if she tried to think little thoughts like “oh I was sure I just saw-” she’d feel real pain, real hot pulsating pain and then she’d pursue it and keep fighting the pain to try and remember but it was a battle she consistently lost til she stopped fighting it.  
The brain is a muscle. It learns pain.  
So Sarah stopped thinking too much into stuff automatically, to avoid pain.  
But she couldn’t help but note it.  
Her hand tensed into claws and she scratched at her arms and head. Inflicting self pain meant the pain in her head eased up quicker.  
Blood dropped onto her plate.  
While the burst of black and white static faded behind her eyes she was forced to remember everything. Everything that was wrong.  
Things like whenever she’d open the door to go outside it would always be nighttime and she’d never be able to go out because Robert and Karen would appear behind her even though they were in their beds seconds before, even though they were outside seconds before, and they’d be there at her shoulder. If she waited too long Robert would put a hand on her arm and say ‘Sarah’ but his skin would feel like paper soaked in grease and although she was never wet she’d feel like she’d been covered in an unimaginable amount of oil and then she was dying in it and suffocating and she was _suffocating and this house was inescapable. She was watched all the time and all she could do was pretend it was fine and go to sleep but she wouldn’t sleep she’d just lie there and try not to scream or cry because her windows wouldn’t open and her father’s eyes were pitch black and sometimes they dripped down like the iris had been punctured and sometimes Karen would be too tall, so needle-like and thin and sometimes Toby would only be there if Sarah wished really hard in her head for him. Holding him was like holding something dead and although he’d be blinking and balling his hands into fists he had no heartbeat and even when he moved in Sarah’s arms he didn’t actually move at all-no muscle moved, no heat came off him, he was a doll with a voice but at least you could feel a doll move its limbs Toby had no feeling at all in him and-_  
Sarah took a drink of her apple juice (which was a glass of what tasted like dusty water). Toby’s eyes were a lighter green since she last looked. It suited him.  
Karen handed her a letter.

_To, Miss Sarah Williams,_  
Three months on from the events of your last run, the council and I have came to a decision.  
Unbeknownst to you, Miss Sarah Marie Williams and your younger brother (Tobias Robert Williams) have been talk of the council since your leave of the labyrinth. As Tobias is an infant and an innocent in the eyes of the court (and won fairly) he has been allowed to go home to his parents.  
Miss Williams you ate faerie food (provided by Jareth, Goblin King, gifted to you by the hobgoblin Hoggle) in the form of a peach. (Eaten in the forest area of the Bog of Eternal Stench, approximately 11 and ¾ hours of your journey).  
Miss Williams you did in fact still win your brother back and rebuked offer of the Underground, however the Underground has not fully let you go.  
In the recent months this council has received multiple letters from:  
-Sir Didymus of Hablen House, the protector of Stench Bridge.  
-Hoggle Hobgoblin, Gardener.  
-A conjoined letter by Ludo Gentle Beast and Sir Didymus (of which he acted as translator).  
All of the above requested visitation to the Aboveground on multiple occasions and subsequently to yourself.  
They have been denied. Miss Williams you are not in the aboveground. You have been with two pixies for the last three months who have used magick to assure you that you are living a normal life but it is merely a simulation of above world reality.  
The council did this with interests of either giving you back to the Above world or by bringing you before the court to discuss the details of you labyrinth run.  
Miss Williams and Jareth, Goblin King, will attend your hearing during tomorrow's twilight in the courtroom of Grand Judge, Queen Escher.  
There is no failing to attend. Your presence is required.  
Signed,  
Alaeivin Petrache. 

_As she was told her presence was required, she looked up from the letter and saw her house slowly losing colour like it was absorbed by the ground. The once completely white walls were bulging with expansion and making movements and sound like a straw being sucked on. Upstairs paint was running down the borders and cracks between the rooms of the house, the whole house was lurching in and out like a sobbing ribcage, the movements drastic. The wind started picking up through the house, the ground was shaking._  
Karen continued smiling at the top of the table sat as she had always been, clicking like she always was.  
She wasn’t always clicking was she?  
Robert had his head in his hands but when he looked up his busted irises stretched down like deflated balloons and when he lifted his face up his chin never left his hands and as his skin and jaw stretched he lost colour and became paler and paler before moaning “Sarah?” and snapping in half. His eyes still looking directly at her.  
The clicking got louder and louder and the face of Karen was smiling at Sarah with her four eyes. Her two eyes. Her eight eyes. No, two. No, eight.  
And she was unchanging Karen, with her eight eyes and eight legs that took up the entire room so that every hair could be seen of her legs and back. She was just Karen.  
Toby just wasn’t there. There was some goblin in the high chair her brother had been sitting in.  
Karen would probably eat him if he didn’t start behaving, Sarah thought.  
The front door exploded off and flew through the foyer, the entrance outside was no longer the black moonless and starless night it had been every night since she got here. It was a red, rusty, coloured sand hill. Maybe or maybe not.  
Sarah looked dazedly at it. And then looked back to her Dad. Robert blinked, but his eyes were too big and he couldn’t blink over them so the dripping irises underneath looked like pen smudge or oil tears.  
The spider handed Sarah a plate clicking happily.  
“Thanks Karen, looks lovely”  
The house started spinning apart, unravelling around her.  
Lancelot fell onto the table and then disintegrated in front of her. The house broke in half, an avalanche of debris cascading around her.  
Karen wasn’t so big now, she’d settled to be smaller. Hand-sized. On Sarah’s hand. She threw it off with instinctive revulsion.  
Her father was just a skeleton now with deep black eye-socket holes. The goblin had either escaped or was not real to start with.  
She felt the red sand around her whirl up with the wind, the goblin castle below the sun in the distance. The labyrinth shrouding it from her.  
The floor opened and she fell through, her heart in her throat as blue hands passed her gently downward and the shock started waning and she began to start breathing very heavily as they passed her down and down to a shanty that could’ve been a thousand years old or twenty seconds new. 

_“Get her down before the ‘quake,_  
Get her down before the shake,  
Get her down the world, may shake,  
Get her down, away, away.  
Give us now our bread and butter,  
Send the spiders all a flutter.  
Oh lookie boys at what we found,  
Pass her as the world falls down” 

_And she opened her eyes to find she was in an oubliette._  
The skeleton across from her lolled its head and the spiders on their webs stayed absolutely still as she walked under them. It was a moonless, starless cave like it’d been every night for three months.  
The sand from what she could see was a rust coloured red.  
She’d never left the labyrinth. Had she even saved Toby?  
She looked to the ceiling and saw a brown spider that clicked at her loud enough for her to hear. She was probably being chastised for throwing her step-mother. Thanks Karen.  
Upon that thought she knelt on the ground, hair over her face and screamed between wracking sobs.  
She didn’t know when she’d started shivering and she’d be hard pushed to tell you when she stopped. 


	2. Chapter Two, The World Looks Bigger in a Crystal Ball

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading thus far! Next chapter is the last.  
> Mentions of blood and self-harm in this one.

Chapter Two, The World Looks Bigger in a Crystal Ball  
:Within such; old friends are reacquainted, a king's crown falls off and the night sky quickly rearranges:  
Sarah felt like each vein in her body carted around potent morphine and she struggled to blink or even dizzily move her head. Every part of her was sore and aching and her eyes took a solid minute to adjust which scared her, a minute blind is longer than you might anticipate when you’re in that situation.  
When she sat up eventually, she began to inspect herself. Her arms were red and caked with dried blood and she could feel clumps of matted blood in her hair. Must have been from all the times she’d been scratching at herself. She hadn’t realised the extent of the damage.  
It was hard to feel anything but cold disconnect. She saw how black her nails were, she smelled herself and regretted it, she touched her arms-some places more tender than others, she could taste metal in her mouth. Everything hurt horrifically but pain at least was real. It wasn’t empty plates and busted balloon eyes. It was real in a way nothing had been in a long time. She felt comfort in that at least.  
She cautiously stood up and stumbled a bit. Once she found her footing she attempted to understand her surroundings more.  
Her hands shot out in front of her as she felt around the floor and walls. Eventually she found some cloth on the floor that hid the door that Hoggle had once shown her.  
She attempted to move it to the wall but was forced to take frequent breaks due to her arms literally giving out on her.  
She started crying a little and had to sit down. She couldn’t move a simple bit of wood onto a wall and standing was starting to hurt in her knees. How was she meant to save Toby or even get out of here if it came to it?

*****

Jareth watched her struggle with a wince that was almost tattooed on his face. It’d been there the entire time he’d been in the courtroom. A giant crystal ball hovering between him and the jury. Her magnified efforts painful to watch.  
The Judge wasn’t there yet, just him and varying degrees of royalty in the jury seats.  
Sarah started crying and he felt a lump raise in his throat.  
Don’t get confused, he still hated her.  
She’d taken all respect he had away from him. People sniggered or pitied him. He hated himself and he wasn’t her number one fan either.  
But he still cared for her somewhere in his ribcage and, even if he didn’t know her an ounce, he hoped he’d still feel sympathy for her.  
She was a mess and his eyes had yet to believe anyone could do this to her.  
The royalty stood and Jareth took a deep breath.  
The Judge began to descend from the ceiling, her legs and arms nimble as an acrobat as she settled comfortably behind the podium.  
The room set it’s attention on the crystal ball.

*****

Sarah finally managed to get the door ready on the wall and was forced to crawl through the opening it presented due to her complete and utter exhaustion.  
She was in an empty room, a room she realised she’d been in before.  
She stood, wobbled but took steps around the room. Her footing became more assured and her pace became frantic, the hall echoing her movements louder and louder and the more she listened to the emptiness, the more she felt panicked.  
Her opening into the room was gone and there was no other exits. Just a round room.  
The stairs leading nowhere. The mirror walls once smashed, reinforced. And when Sarah attempted it again wooden splinters surrounded her.  
A voice reverberated around the room, leaving Sarah’s eyes to dart wildly for its possessor.  
She had no luck but she didn’t give up.

*****

“Court is now in session, Judge Queen Escher presiding”  
The owner of the voice was an average sized blotchy red goblin. It’s hat had a blue plume that kept getting in its eyes.  
The Queen was in black and purple, her dress of victorian inspiration. The skirt encompassed her seat and the train of her halo veil cascaded around both sides of her podium.  
She spoke with a smile but her voice was sinister. She gestured with arms and hands when she spoke, like she was putting on a show.  
“The Court speaks to Sarah Marie Williams and Jareth, King of Goblins. Today we speak to determine whether Ms Williams may be freed from our world. Be seated,” she gestured.  
“And bring forth the company who bear witness”  
Jareth turned to stare, in a cage was a crunched up Ludo who seemed visibly scared. He whimpered into his fur a few times.  
A conjoined cage held Sir Didymus and Hoggle; their cage much smaller and the lack of space between them more pronounced because of this.  
“The Court calls to attention Ludo gentle beast, Sir Didymus and Hoggle Hobgoblin. May Ms Williams be present?”  
Trees that surrounded the clearing they were in bristled and moved and twirled to reveal a pathway.

*****

Sarah saw the bricks in the walls shuffle like playing cards and saw a glimpse of a clearing. The clearing was surrounded by trees, the grass almost neon in colour. The sun seemed to beam directly overhead yet Sarah felt no warmth, it reminded her of Toby from her “simulation” as they called it. Cold, dead, limp. There for comfort more than need.  
There were benches in the clearing fashioned out of a white sycamore that knotted in on itself to expertly it looked like the tree it came from grew it as a chair, she couldn’t picture anyone making five or six benches this naturally by hand.  
And as she got closer she saw people walking around in masks, their faces all but completely covered. A ring of rose thorns or nettles sticking into their heads. Their hair was clumped and matted in blood. It made Sarah tenderly touch her own head and feel her own blood. At least hers was dried and healing, it almost looked like their blood was new.  
And then the clearing wasn’t so pretty anymore and she started seeing more.  
The birds in the trees were skeletal, their bones prominent when the light shone through their feathers and flesh.  
She looked up to see Jareth. His blonde hair neatly brushed, combed. His suit picturesque. He looked artificial too. Too much like a memory to be real.  
And then she started to focus on the cages near the end of the path, saw rust coloured fur and a paw trying to reach her. Ludo howled her name.  
Tears filled her eyes and a hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, Ludo” was all she could say. She attempted to run to him but her legs stumbled and she was forced to stop to straighten herself up.  
“My lady! Are you quite alright?”  
Next cage. Didymus and Hoggle. So uncomfortably pushed together it made a hole appear in Sarah’s stomach and filled her with such a nauseating ache for her friends.  
She wanted to apologise. Feel in her pocket and find the key to their cages. But she had no way of helping them, and no words to make any of this better.  
“If Ms Williams is ready?”  
Sarah looked up. The speaker seemed annoyed she’d been so clearly noticed last.  
“We may now proceed”

*****

Jareth looked her and really looked in a way the crystal ball just wouldn’t let him. Saw every ingrained scratch and scar. Saw her neat black hair tangled in blood and sand. Saw once kind eyes wild with anxiety and fear.  
He watched her drink in the world around her and even now, despite the circumstances, despite what had happened, he almost laughed.  
Her brown eyes were, yes, wild with fear, but the wonder had not left them yet. Even now she looked at her surroundings like they were a sentence in a book and she was giving each object of her eye its own individual weight.  
She didn’t like the Queens birds. They had that in common.  
Her face was so open to read. The Crowned morbidly interested her and she was embarrassed by her own stares.  
He didn’t expect her to fall to the ground, weeping, happy to see him but her eyes flitted over him so quickly and moved on so fast that he couldn’t help the tip of his lips flicking up. His own instant reaction had been ‘ouch’ and it amused him somewhat to see how fresh that pain still was.  
When Escher called them to attention, he watched her stumble some more. He was happy with how close she came to him. Probably for safety. He liked that.  
“The Court will ask a few questions, we will have a brief recess and then be told the verdict-”  
“Verdict for what?” Jareth interrupted, “What’s to be decided?”  
Escher smiled and she seemed to blink with more eyes than she possessed.  
“Whether Ms Williams is an innocent,” she looked at Sarah and Jareth felt her recoil, “and what to do if she is not.”  
“The question is simple really,” Escher continued, “did she eat the peach?”  
Jareth watched the Jury nod. He didn’t like this.  
“No” he answered, his voice stronger than he thought it’d be. “She had a bite of the peach, it’s not the same thing.”  
“What is the difference then, Jareth? Please enlighten us,” the Queen clasped her fingers together and used the conjoined hands to prop up her chin. This was all a theatre play to her and Jareth would bet good money that she didn’t care how this all played out. She just liked watching and stirring it all up so nothing would settle the way it was.  
Jareth swallowed.  
“Persephone's law,” Jareth recited, “the most famous fae law, to not eat our food. When Persephone sucked on pomegranate seeds, she was judged on how many she swallowed not how many she had in her mouth. Sarah didn’t consume the whole peach therefore the decision should reflect that”  
Escher’s eyes flashed like polished silver. “Well argued”  
He nodded. He looked out the corner of his eye and saw Sarah had moved closer to him. Her mouth slack, she looked up at him.  
“Then, is she innocent?” Escher asked of no one in particular.  
When no one spoke up, she asked again, at Sarah pointedly.  
“N-no,” Sarah mumbled and cleared her throat, “because I still had a bite”  
Jareth glared at her. Who on trial admits fault in any way?  
“Then I believe it’s time for our brief recess” and with a click of her tongue, Escher was gone from her podium.  
Jareth and Sarah met eyes. It was time for the dust to settle.  
They both opened their mouths to talk.


End file.
